The public blamed Trump for the shutdown — but that may be changing

The surveys all pointed toward the same conclusion: In the minds of most Americans, Trump was largely to blame. But public opinion may be changing. Those three polls were all conducted before Christmas, when the shutdown was just a few days old. On Wednesday, HuffPost/YouGov released a poll, conducted Dec. 28-30, during the shutdown’s second week, that showed more people disapproving of Congress’s role in the shutdown than of Trump’s. In the poll, 49 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the shutdown while 38 percent approved. Meanwhile, 51 percent disapproved of congressional Democrats’ handling of the shutdown and 33 percent approved. Congressional Republicans got the worst score: 58 percent disapproved of the way they’ve handled the shutdown, and just 25 percent approved. That might indicate that blame is shifting from who caused the shutdown in the first place (pretty clearly Trump, who refused to sign a bill he’d previously signaled he’d support) to who is now preventing it from being resolved (less clear). Indeed, those numbers represented a slight improvement for Trump, and a more substantial deterioration for members of Congress, compared with HuffPost’s first poll of the shutdown, conducted Dec. 22-23.

But these numbers are still bad news politically for both Trump and Democrats, right? Not so fast.